The New York Times just hired a climate science denialist as its newest op-ed columnist

Desdemona Despair

By Kate Yoder
14 April 2017

(Grist) – The New York Times just hired a climate denier. Related: Have you seen any ads like this in your newsfeed lately?

Well, here’s a fact: The Times announced this week that Bret Stephens — a longtime climate science denier and current editorial deputy editor at The Wall Street Journal — is its newest op-ed columnist. […]

In recent months, the Times has been aggressively expanding its climate coverage as “climate and environment reporting is taking on new urgency.” Now pit that move against hiring Stephens, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning commentary includes gems like this:

Here’s a climate prediction for the year 2115: Liberals will still be organizing campaigns against yet another mooted social or environmental crisis. Temperatures will be about the same. [more]

The New York Times just hired a climate denier.

By Kate Aronoff
12 April 2017

(In These Times) – In late March, the New York Times’ editorial board called President Trump’s move to dismantle Obama-era climate protections “deeply dismaying,” citing “the rock-solid scientific consensus that without swift action the consequences of climate change—rising seas, more devastating droughts, widespread species extinction—are likely to get steadily worse.” Today the paper announced it has hired a climate denier as an op-ed columnist.

Bret Stephens, currently the Wall Street Journal’s deputy editorial page editor, has won a Pulitzer Prize. He has also written multiple pieces casting doubt on what in 2014 he called “the purported threat of global warming.” In 2010, following a hyped-up pseudo-controversy over a climate researcher’s emails, he cheerfully announced that the “secular panic” of “global warming is dead, nailed into its coffin one devastating disclosure, defection and re-evaluation at a time.”

“Herewith, then, I propose a readers’ contest to invent the next panic,” he urged. “It must involve something ubiquitous, invisible to the naked eye and preferably mass-produced.” […]

Whether climate change exists is no longer a debate. False equivalence has been a fatal flaw in much mainstream climate coverage: Offering equal space to two sides of a controversy that doesn’t exist, and has been fueled to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars by fossil fuel-funded disinformation campaigns. [more]

Why the Hell Did the New York Times Just Hire a Climate Denier?